It was the middle of the afternoon when Luke Edwards, the Telegraph’s north-east football correspondent, got a call from a Newcastle United press officer. They were “screaming and shouting” and demanding an apology. His crime, it transpired, was reporting that the club’s dressing room was in disarray. His punishment was a ban from St James’ Park until the following season.

Newcastle are by no means the only club in British football to ban a journalist or a whole news outlet in recent years. In England, Port Vale, Rotherham United, Nottingham Forest and Crawley Town are among those to have placed restrictions on journalists. In Scotland, Celtic have had a fraught relationship with the media.

And, earlier this month, Swindon Town decided that they would no longer allow any news outlets that they did not have a commercial deal with into press conferences. Instead, the club’s owner Lee Power says interviews will be conducted by its own “in-house journalist” and distributed via its website and on a social media smartphone app.

Power says the new approach will “engage the fans and give them more of an insight into how the team and the club is run” than stories written by someone from outside. The Swindon Advertiser’s coverage of Swindon Town, he feels, has been too negative and he wants to “move away from the traditional press conference, where the same person comes and asks questions”. Power also says that, while no cash has yet changed hands, he hopes the deal with the app will eventually be a money maker.

“Because they have their own websites and sometimes even their own television channels, clubs … are coming to see [papers] as commercial rivals,” says Edwards. “They want to direct fans to their own websites and apps because they want to make more money from the advertising.​ I think that is incredibly dangerous because, believe it or not, football fans are not stupid. The stuff that is put out on official websites is bland, sanitised and only focuses on the positive. Some clubs are even calling their press officers ‘in-house journalists’. They are not journalists, they are marketing or PR staff.”

Swindon Town FC bans media outlets from press conferences

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Edwards is not the only journalist to have been told they are not welcome at Newcastle under owner Mike Ashley. And the club is one of many now offering content produced in-house on its website. Access to the interviews and behind-the-scenes footage is limited to members, who can pay up to £53.88 per year.

Premier League rules requiring clubs to give post-match media interviews can sometimes be more of a hindrance than a help, Edwards says, because they allow clubs just to favour the rights holders.

Clubs are looking at their profitable relationships with those rights holders and wondering why newspapers should get access for free. Newcastle have even floated the idea of news outlets paying for interviews in the past.

Power was clear that, while other news outlets were banned from Swindon, the BBC – with which it has a radio commentary deal – was still welcome at the club.

And there are claims that Newcastle recently entered into a commercial deal with the Mirror, which – alongside Premier League rights holder Sky Sports – was the only organisation allowed into the unveiling of the club’s new manager, Steve McClaren, last month. Newcastle later admitted to fans that it was trying to “control and reinforce the positive messages the club wished to deliver”.

Media bans are nothing new: former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson was both feared and respected by journalists, very few of whom had not been banned by him at one time or another. But, according to Tim Luckhurst, professor of journalism at the University of Kent, they are becoming more common, driven by technological advances making it easier for organisations and individuals to become publishers. “What you are seeing at football clubs is becoming an ever greater problem in the media world. Part of it is because technology allows people to produce things that they think look like journalism.

“People think that all you need is the ability to write words and use a camera and a microphone. The notion that there might be some ethics behind this is genuinely alien to some people. They wonder why they need an intermediary.” He sees the argument that the best source of news about a club is the club itself as “profoundly misleading”, adding: “They are not trying to tell the truth, they are trying to con their fans into believing that they will get the truth out of what will be a packaged corporate PR exercise.”

Edwards says: “In the past, clubs banned people if what they wrote was not true. But now, journalists are banned just because the club does not like a story they wrote.”

Newcastle banned three local papers after they devoted 15 pages to a protest march attended by “approximately 300 supporters”. The club did not argue that coverage was inaccurate, but that it was disproportionate.

The Football Supporters’ Federation says fans lose out when clubs ban local media, calling the issue “worrying”. “When access to players or club officials is dependent upon money or a guarantee of favourable reporting, it stops those in power from having to face independent scrutiny,” says a spokesman.

“An objective and independent press is vital, and is often the only way that fans can find out the truth about what’s going on at their clubs”.

Clubs can hold particular sway over local papers. “About 99% of Swindon Town fans will get their news from the local paper. The club benefits from that because they are, with the best will in the world, covering something that others would not,” says Edwards.​​

He is now the object of a third ban from Newcastle United – the result of separate transgressions and residual resentment, he believes. Long after that irate phone call from the club’s press office, he says, however, the club’s manager finally admitted to him that he was behind the original ban – and it was later confirmed that the story the club strongly felt should never have come out had been true all along.